With Google Analytics you can find out whether your website is successful. This short guide will show you how to set up and use the analysis tool correctly.

Set up Google Analytics correctly

Sign up with Google Analytics.

You must enter an account name, your website and the industry category of your website on the registration page. Select your desired tracking method. Universal Analytics” gives you access to the latest functions, but “Classic Analytics” is completely sufficient for many purposes. Click on “Retrieve Tracking ID” below.

Once you have confirmed the privacy policy, the management profile of your Google Analytics account will open.

Under “Tracking Information” (the start page after successful registration) you will find your tracking ID directly. Below you will also find the code snippet that you copy into your website code to have your page analyzed in the future.

Do not change the snippet code. Copy the snippet and paste it on each web page you want to watch. If you insert the code directly before the closing </head> tag, “Google Analytics” will also register short visits from users. However, if you want to shorten the loading times, put the code at the bottom of the page. Upload the modified files to your server.

On the “Tracking Information” page, the tracking status changes from “uninstalled” to “installed” immediately. You should receive information about your website a few hours later.

Google Analytics – the most important functions

You can use Google Analytics in many different ways. We describe a few functions below

Under “Reports”->”Target group” the characteristics of your visitors are analysed. At this point you can find out whether your website is increasingly being accessed on the move or from which countries your users come. By forwarding server data, it may happen that you frequently register visitors from America. Also through public WLANs (e.g. in internet cafés) you get many users from Ireland or Holland.

Under “Administration”->”Property”->”Settings for social content” you can define properties that do not contain your Google Analytics code (e.g. your Facebook or Youtube profl). So you can do social tracking. This tells you which social interaction was performed how often and by which people.

You can set notifications via “Reports”->”Radar”. Then you will be notified in the event of strong changes with regard to certain measured values. For example, Google Analytics can alert you to new access patterns for your website.

Under “Reports”->”Behavior” you can also observe the behavioral flow of your users. You will learn how users become aware of your website and how they interact with it.

The best tips for Google Analytics

If you suspect that some pages of your website are not correctly integrated in your Google Analytics profile, then use the “Google Analytics Debugger” to search for errors.

Under “Reports”->”Dashboards”->”Private”->”My Dashboard” you can arrange all important analysis tools and graphs at a glance and display the data better. If you add the analysis tools via “Add +Widget”, you can, for example, display a pie chart showing the number of visitors by month.

Under “Manage”->”Data view”->”Targets” you can set up so-called “Targets”. One goal could be for example that a user plays a video on your site – so you can see how successfully you have set up your site for a goal.

You can compare your measured values with other measured values. To do this, enter two different measured values in the overviews (e.g. under “Behavior”-> “Overview”) under “in comparison to”.